Giant Bomb Review
41 CommentsSouth Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play! Review
4- XBLM
by Brad Shoemaker on
Almost in spite of itself, this is both a solid tower defense game and a good piece of fan service for South Park fans.
In a way, Xbox Live Arcade sort of has its own version of PixelJunk Monsters now. That game extended the standard tower defense concept by turning your abstract cursor--the thing you use to determine where you build different sorts of towers--into an actual character. But all that character could really do was pick up money dropped from enemies, which you then spent on more towers. This South Park game further extends that concept by giving you not one but four onscreen characters who can build towers, and it also gives those characters an attack.
Guess who those initial four characters are? Right--Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman, all of whom can throw snowballs at enemies. You can also charge up the snowballs to make them yellow (and more powerful), and each character has a special attack that damages all the enemies onscreen, spawns a bunch of bonus money, amps your attack power, and so on. There are a ton of other playable characters you can unlock from the series too, from Jimmy and Clyde to Bebe and, yeah, Timmy. They all have their own tasteless specials that involve things like crutches and colostomy bags. (Yep, definitely South Park.) The characters are all different enough from each other in terms of speed, power, special abilities, and voiceovers to make them all at least worth messing around with.
Mechanically, this is tower defense through and through. The enemies run the gamut of antagonist groups from the series, including terrorists, sixth graders, hippies, homeless people, Scott Tenorman, the dreaded Christmas critters, and, yes, crab people. (Craaaab people, craaaab people.) As per the genre's standards, each is weak to different kinds of towers, which include baseball launchers, and the Pee-tron, a mounted contraption that sprays cat urine. I hear that stuff can get you high. You can build walls out of snow to create lanes for the enemies to wander through, exposing them to your towers for longer. That's what this genre is all about, and South Park does a perfectly adequate job of it.
Realistically, you'd need to be a fan of either South Park or tower defense to get the most out of this game. If you've got an interest in either subject--or, ideally, both--there are much worse ways to spend 800 points on Xbox Live Arcade.
